DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. Neo4j vs. OpenTSDB vs. SQLite vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. Neo4j vs. OpenTSDB vs. SQLite vs. TerminusDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

Scalable Time Series DBMS based on HBase

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	1.68
Rank	#142	Overall
	#12	Time Series DBMS

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	0.23
Rank	#316	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

neo4j.com/docs

opentsdb.net/docs/build/html/index.html

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Neo4j, Inc.

currently maintained by Yahoo and other contributors

Dwayne Richard Hipp

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2012

2007

2011

2000

2018

Current release

5.20, May 2024

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

LGPL

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

GPL V3

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Implementation language

Java, Scala

Java

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

server-less

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numeric data for metrics, strings for tags

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

HTTP API
Telnet API

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Erlang
Go
Java
Python
R
Ruby

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

based on HBase

none

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

selectable replication factor

based on HBase

none

Journaling Streams

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Immediate Consistency

based on HBase

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

Role-based access control

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
» more

Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
» more

News

This Week in Neo4j: Importing Data, NODES, GenAI, Going Meta and more
1 June 2024

openCypher Will Pave the Road to GQL for Cypher Implementers
22 May 2024

7 Tips for Submitting Your NODES 2024 Talk
22 May 2024

How to Configure Neo4j Aura With AWS PrivateLink
21 May 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Podcast, GraphRAG, GraphQL, Chatbot and more
18 May 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.